Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) are essential in facilitating access to applications, documents, files, and functions in virtually all modern operating systems and a computer's resident applications and documents. The early DOS operating systems were probably the only systems in use that did not rely on a GUI to facilitate user input and interactivity. Online GUI's are mostly resident to the web browser, e-mail program, or web pages. However, the persistent type of GUI that is used for web-related purposes and functions independent of web pages (usually for the purpose of facilitating specific functions such as displaying advertising banners, messages, audio and video streams, etc.) does not appear inside a conventional display window. (Examples: NetZero, PointCast, and other similar Push Technology web publishers; Nason et al., and U.S. Pat. No. 6,018,332, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety. The most common characteristic of this type of GUI is that when they are deployed to the user's screen on a monitor, they display in the shape of a bar or box that cuts-off or covers a portion of the view of the desktop display. This process is ‘subtractive’ as it removes a portion of that view which was present prior to GUI deployment. In the ‘desktop only’ view and with no other windows open, this type of persistent GUI sits on top of the desktop display and will cover anything that was originally in that specific area of the desktop display. Most GUI's of this type can be moved to the top or bottom of the desktop display through user input. When resident application windows are open, the window will resize to fit whatever area is left unoccupied by the GUI. To view the part of the window that has been ‘subtracted’ from the normal full view, the system recognizes that the display window is smaller in either its horizontal or vertical dimension and, subsequently, responds by displaying a scroll bar used to scroll the lost image of the window's content into view.
Although there are differences in the appearance and functions of GUI's, this type of display always results in the same ‘subtractive’ effect on the desktop display view. This prompted a need for a different approach to the deployment and display of a GUI, especially when it carries with it a function that may require a long term or full time active and accessible presence to the user online and/or offline. The objective is to preserve the normal complete view of the desktop display by proportionally reducing it in an inwardly direction toward the center of the display, thus resulting in a slightly smaller size and area but with the entire desktop display proportionally in tact and operational. This reduction process results in a “blanked” area that, in the preferred embodiment, surrounds the reduced desktop display on up to all four sides of the screen. This creates an area to deploy and display a fully functional GUI as a Persistent Portal (PP) simultaneously with the desktop that, in the preferred embodiment, takes the shape of a frame wrapping entirely around the new desktop display. This is an “additive” process as it adds the graphics and functionality of the PP without subtracting any portion of the view or functionality of the operating system's desktop, resident applications, or documents.